A Dumpster Diving Treasure

by phantasm  (phantasm@textbox.net)

Among many of the things I love to take part in, Dumpster diving always has that small thrill of actual treasure hunting.  Sooner or later you are bound to find a manual with enough information to keep you reading for a few days or even months.  Other times you may get lucky and find an old computer that has parts you can use.

A few months ago, during my weekly dive excursion, I happened to stumble upon quite a treasure in my favorite dive spot.  On top of the Dumpster sat a beautiful green system, just under 18-inch wide, 24-inch deep, and 1.7-inch tall.  I was quite excited about finding something aside from the usual Post-it note about where they were going to eat, or the regular office memo to put cigarettes in the ashtray outside and not on the sidewalk.

I dropped my umbrella, and after a few attempts to get to the top of the Dumpster, I made it and put it in my car.  Unsure of what exactly it was, I dug around a bit more for a manual or something about it and found nothing.

Later that evening I got home and peeled it apart, noting it was quite compact internally.  Inside were three PCI slots used by a fiber Gigabit Ethernet adapter and two CryptoSwift SSL hardware accelerator cards.  The CPU was an Intel Celeron 500 MHz, 64 MB RAM chip, and a 64 MB CompactFlash card as its drive.  Looking more into it, I noticed there was no keyboard port, or a video connector at all, so getting into a console would be a slight challenge.

After writing down part numbers, I put it back together and did a few searches.  It appeared I had an Alteon iSD-100 and off I was on a search for technical documentation.  Hooking it up and attempting to power it on, I found the power button was broken off.  A pen tip was all I needed, and the whir of the fans chimed through the room.  Running a serial cable from its serial port to my system, I tried to get a console that way with no luck.

After a bit more reading, I discovered a need for an Alteon Web OS Switch to access the system.  So it was time for a lot more research.

The board inside was labeled Teknor Applicom, Inc., with a PCI-946-1 system board.  By using a PCI video card, I was able to remove the fiber card and replace it to get a video output of what was going on during boot.  I was quite pleased to see the system was fully functional and booting fine.

The manual for the board showed the pin-outs for its connectors, which was a wonderful help.  I was able to find the keyboard interface information in the manual (page 108 of the PDF), and set up to find a way to add my own.

With an old Pentium II board that got fried, I cut out its PS/2 keyboard connector with some snips, removed the excess solder from the pins, and cleaned it up for a better connection.  I had to figure out a way to set up the connector around the way this case was set up.  In the true form of imprecision, I grabbed a nice length of Cat 5 cable (once again found Dumpster diving) and stripped the ends of the wires bare for a connection.  After some solder work we had the wires connected to the PCI-964-1 board and ran the Cat 5 to the back of the system to another hole provided for another serial port.  The connector was soldered on at the other end and some electrical tape to guard the bare wires and pins from the case.

Plugging up a keyboard, I started it up and saw the damage that could be done.  During the BIOS load, the keyboard lights came on, and Red Hat Linux began to boot.  Staring at the Login: prompt I was quite excited.  Of course I started with a quick basic guess for root with the password alteon and there I sat at a working console.

A quick browse around to see what was there and I powered it down.  I removed a crypto card and popped in a 3Com NIC, rebooted, brought up the interface, and turned on SSH.  A few changes to set it all up automatically for me, another power down, removal of the video card, and brought it back up.  I now had a system to play with at my desk for more comfort.

From there I got a bit more curious and wanted to expand the system some more.  I added 256 MB of RAM, then attempted to add a 20 GB HDD and a CD-ROM.  I didn't have much luck with that, but found out if I removed the CompactFlash card I could use the HDD on /dev/hdc where the CF used to be.  After a bit more playing, I got Linux installed on the 20 GB drive on /dev/hde and it was working fine as a home server.

The system provided me with well over a month of fun and learning, as well as some interesting calls to Nortel trying to understand the BIOS and restrictions set into it.  Granted I did not get much information - it was brought to my attention that resetting it required removing and adding a new BIOS chip which I am too lazy to do.

The moral of this long winded article?  Dumpster diving can provide you with expensive treasures and a long time of fun and learning.

Thanks to 404 and Tyler for assistance on systems running CompactFlash cards and the rest of Textbox Networks for help on other areas of learning the system.

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